


A Shadow Walks Across Your Grave

by MAVEfm



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Brothers, Family, Gen, Klaus Hargreeves Deserves Better, Number Five | The Boy Needs A Hug, Reginald Hargreeves' A+ Parenting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-06
Updated: 2019-03-10
Packaged: 2019-11-12 15:35:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18013577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MAVEfm/pseuds/MAVEfm
Summary: Five knows he's changed, he knows his family has changed.He's reintroducing himself to strangers, forcing himself to compartmentalize, to focus. It doesn't, it shouldn't, and it can't matter how lost he is. He'll get used to the feeling of disconnect, used to the cold needles in his back whenever Klaus is around, because he'd fix it. He'd fix everything when this was done.





	1. Chapter 1

  
  


Regretfully, Number Five came home wholly unprepared to face the selfish assholes his sibling had become. Which was harsh, considering for the last 45 years he had only cared about himself through necessity, and in the end, had also become a bit of a selfish prick.

 

He was ready to face them though, which couldn’t be said about any of them about each other, so he was proud of that. He could adapt and accept anything sent his way, the apocalypse had taught him how, and the Temps Commission only tuned his ability for it.

 

It was jarring, however, to discover that this ability didn’t come in handy as well as he liked, considering the unpredictability of his siblings. They were as uncontrollable as cats, determined to stick to whatever unhealthy coping methods they had found in their youth, and held more trauma than Five could care to shake a stick at. 

 

He was the same way, though he really didn’t have the time to dwell on it.

 

At least Allison was or had been, getting somewhere. She had always been the most well adjusted of them, though not by much.

 

Five was, unfortunately, most unprepared to see Klaus, Number Four, The Seance. Unprepared to just be around him again, having long forgotten about the dark feeling that Klaus had always carried around him again. Number Five remembered, distinctly, growing used to it as a child, until it had been cut short.

 

45 years in solitude hadn’t really done him many favors, he was be changed, as was his family, he’d been aware of that fact for a very long time. He was jaded now, slightly unhinged even, maybe worse now that the only clothes that fit him as of late were schoolboy shorts and an argyle vest.

 

He’d also lost the ability to look his brother Klaus in the eye.

 

For the longest of times, Vanya’s book had been his own personal bible. Each page crinkled and yellowed with age, written on, bent, torn, poked full of holes where he’d been overzealous with a pen, ink had bled through the paper, and his own blood had stained the edges. It was, too say the least, trashed.

 

He’d read it countless times, sometimes in one sitting, laying in his motel rooms throughout time, out of order, back to front, leaping sometimes paragraph to paragraph as if hidden messages would make themselves clear. He’d memorized certain parts, the tangents and funny stories she would often trail off into. She was a wonderful writer, but he’d also held one simple fact very close to his heart.

 

She was biased.

 

It didn’t make any of what she wrote invalid, he knew. But she was also angry. Vanya was, at her very best, selfless and kind, but the book wasn’t safe from her own rage. He could read between the lines and see even as she complained of her siblings high and arrogant tendencies, she’d inherited a few of those same habits for herself.

 

His chapter, he had found, was lighter and kinder than most, thank god.

 

Chapter Five, which was sly like she was, was titled:  _ The Picture On the Back of My Milk Cartons. _

 

Which hurt, even if Five found it blase, at times.

 

It was his favorite chapter, though, even after so many years. It was kind to him, light-hearted yet ultimately bittersweet in its presentation. He really did love it. He’d even bookmarked and underlined the page in which he was referred to as Vanya’s ‘closest confidant and conspirator’. At many times throughout his life, he’d often open the book just to read the sentence over and over, smiling to himself, letting it strengthen his resolve in saving them all if only to thank her for such a wonderful description.

 

Five had never found many things difficult.

 

Surviving the apocalypse, while hard and backbreaking and altogether the most terrifying thing he’d ever done, he’d known what he was doing.

 

Most of the time.

 

What he had found to be quite difficult, was reading chapter 14.

 

Titled:  _ ‘Number Four’,  _ it was the last of the chapters that focused on a specific sibling, and so simply titled that even Five found it a bit striking. While all the others had gotten chapters like:  _ ‘The Vigilante’ _ (Diego’s), or:  _ ‘I Heard a Rumor’  _ (Allison’s, of course), or even the coy: _ ‘The Favorite’ _ (Luther’s, which had always given him reason to snicker), Klaus’s chapter had almost grabbed him by the neck with how little momentum it had. 

 

For a time, he’d simply skipped past it, leaving it so undisturbed that the pages were still just a little bit brighter than the rest. A clean stripe surrounded by the wear and tear he’d inflicted on the rest of the book. It strangely frightened him, with how scathing Vanya could be, he worried that something so terrible had happened between the two of them that she could only cool her anger just enough to refer to him by his number. She could certainly be brutal, the chapters that outlined the press and the media’s hyper fixation on them as child stars a particularly good example, but Five struggled with the notion that Klaus and she had ever come to any sort of blows in one way or the other.

 

Delores might have been the one to finally convince him to stop being: ‘such a pussy and read the damn thing’.

 

Her words, not his. She was wonderfully blunt at the best of times.

 

He’d found it to be the exact opposite of what he feared.

 

Vanya, more than anything, felt sorry for Klaus.

 

The chapter was written with the utmost hesitation, with apologies dotting its layout, admitting to the reader that she didn’t know him well enough anymore, and neither did anyone else.

 

She backtracked, as she often did, to the smoking gun: Ben Hargreeves’ unspeakably horrible death. It was then where the divide between the siblings had become too wide to cross, and the most treacherous for Klaus.

 

While he had always been flighty, easy to please, perpetually only half-listening, according to Vanya, he’d been over the deep end long before any of them.

 

Five never knew the details of all the ways their father had experimented on each of them. For him, it was being forced to blink through walls and other solid barriers until he felt his insides rearrange. Driven to vomiting, and then directed to try again, Number Five, again, until you can go farther, and faster.

 

He did just that, and unfortunately, thanks to the old man.

 

What the old man did to Klaus, he was never sure. His brother was easily frightened of many things, from the dark, to clowns, to uncomfortable clothing and touching things that writhed (even if he would often ask to Diego to chop worms in half or cut open a dead bird to see its insides, he was ghoulish, and acclimated to the macabre in a way none of them were). Perhaps the old man had worked to quell his fear of the dead in some way, as he could remember Klaus returning home from his personal training paler, and quieter than usual.

 

Vanya had the same hypothesis.

 

Out of all of them, Klaus’s abilities were the least tangible, harder to grasp and understand because they weren’t detectable. In this way, Vanya believed, the old man had damaged Klaus in the same undetectable manner.

 

Five had gripped the book so tightly then, running his thumbnail over the paper and putting crescent-shaped indents close to the paragraphs that made him nervous, frightened even. As Vanya tested theories on what she believed Klaus saw or might see, in his dreams and in the waking hours. Five couldn’t hope to really imagine it for himself, he was clinical, logical, he had to be, there was a lot of math involved in the way he moved. He created and broke the laws of physics with every blink. He couldn’t ponder the nature of death through the eyes of his flighty, illogical brother, he didn’t have the time.

 

Vanya could describe with perfect accuracy, however, what it had felt like to be around Klaus. Five knew she had been leading up to it paragraphs before even hinting at it. Klaus had carried a strange and otherworldly feeling with him wherever he went, he toed the line between life and death every minute of every day, it was unsettling to be around, if you weren’t used to it. Looking into his eyes, it felt as if he could see through you, see the soul, the thing that made you alive. 

 

Like standing in Death’s shadow.

 

In the apocalypse, he’d almost missed it, a testament to how crazy he was really going.

 

Vanya described Klaus as someone so deeply affected by their father’s games, that she worried if he was even really sane. Beginning from the time he would roll joints under the dinner table, which Five remembered fondly, to now, or then, since he was dead now, to when she’d been his emergency contact after his seventh overdose in what had to have been just as many years. He talked to himself often, stared off into space for hours at a time, spent more time high than sober, the list went on and left Five aching.

 

She truly didn’t know if it was her brother anymore, or just drugs and insanity masquerading as him. She had hope for him, she insisted on it, but knew there needed to be some miracle or spiritual experience to truly ever help him, instead of the endless trips to rehab.

 

His one solace had once been Ben, comrades in the fact that they were both terrified of their abilities.

 

She backtracked, smoking gun, Ben’s death. All too real and absolutely heart-wrenching, making Five guilty he hadn’t been there. But who would he have been had he not wished himself to the future? The question kept him up at night.

 

Now, in the wake of his return, his de-aging, and in the final stage of his plan to save all life on Earth from the future owner of a glass eye…

 

They were all useless, his plan was useless, and he couldn’t bring himself to look Klaus in the eyes.

 

Not just because he was shorter now, shut up, Delores.

 

The last time he had seen them all looking like how they did now, they had been dead, almost unrecognizable until Klaus had had the common decency to die with his Academy tattoo facing the sky. It had been easy to distinguish who was who then. And so obvious, too. Each of them still bursting with personality even though they were only corpses

 

He’d been unable to find Ben, and for a while, before finding the book, he’d let himself believe that The Horror had lived somehow. That the monsters under his skin had protected him.

 

He never did find Vanya, though.

 

But now he was back, looking the corpses in their living, narcissistic faces.

 

Even Vanya, his ‘closest confidant’ (a description he still believed), was… Unaccepting of the facts. How frustrating, to discover that looking and sounding like a 13 year old boy, really did make it harder for people to take you seriously.

 

“Maybe it did affect my mind,” he said, “I just need some rest.”

 

He watched her go, his heart pounding. 

 

So he’d enlisted the help of someone who could relate to his predicament, someone who, as he remembered, was skilled at improvising, playing a part. Someone nobody took seriously, just like Five.

 

Klaus had tumbled out of the closet, which reminded him offhand of the time Klaus had outed himself on live television when they were ten. So really, the closet was slightly serendipitous.

 

Five had felt it then, as they were talking, telling Klaus to shut up she might hear you and arguing about the outfit. It was deja vu, some similar conversation they’d had in their youth of the same subject. But the feeling, a cold and internal squeeze at the base of his throat, even while high Klaus still carried it. 

 

Five knew what death was, how it felt, he’d  _ been _ Death, for all he cared.

 

Klaus didn’t seem to care, and neither did the shadow of Death that clung to him. Five felt nauseous just being around it. He would have to deal with it, and now, if he hoped to keep complete focus on his mission.

 

For now, he buried himself near the back of the old man’s walk in closet, digging for something more appropriate for Klaus to wear.

 

“Ugh,” Klaus began, throwing clothes that upset him aside with reckless abandon, “For a millionaire that could afford the luxuries of Balenciaga, and Gucci, and,  _ Versace _ ,” He put a hand to his chest in reverence. Five rolled his eyes. “Dear old dad always seemed to wear _his_ suits straight off the rack… _Ooh!”_ He squeaked, “This will work! Double breasted and- _ please _ tell me there’s a vest-!”

 

There was.

 

_ “Saint Laurent _ , who knew?”

 

“Let’s just get this over with,” Five could hear the taxi outside, and would rather argue with the overpaid Meritech Idiot Lance Bigs than think about how jealous he was of the rest of his siblings, so skilled at ignoring the goosebumps that Klaus gave them.

 

Of course when Klaus is slapping the shit out of him, (something that will never happen again, or so help Five he would strangle Klaus) the chills rocket down his neck and into his whole body. His hair stands on end and a cold burst of air chills him through to his organs. He ignores it, seeing red and tasting his bloody lip until Klaus says: “Peace on Earth!” 

 

The snow globe, miraculously, doesn’t knock him out. There’s this wild look in his eye that makes Lance shiver, a pulse in the air that just radiates fear and manic. Five has lived that feeling for the past couple years and it’s familiar. Far more familiar than cold and shadows. He understands Klaus’ plan and feels a gust of pride, his own smile wide and just as creepy, though he suspects that’s just what his smile was nowadays.

 

The eye is a bust.

 

He feels deflated.

 

Klaus’ head drips with blood and glitter, which really were his aesthetic, Five could give him that.

 

“Yeah, can I get my twenty bucks now?”

 

Five balls his fists, stomping his foot like the thirteen year old he was now, “You’re all  _ useless! _ ”

 

Klaus meets his eyes, bringing with them shadows and the faces of the dead, hands outstretched and screaming. Five holds his ground and Klaus is  _ joking _ with him-

 

“You must be horny,” Klaus sidle up next to him, “As _ hell! _ ” He laughs, and Five is thrown into some memory, looking at the empty street and the hospital buildings. His personal countdown to the apocalypse takes a momentary back seat as he relives the few singular moments of his childhood he could remember sharing with Klaus. The two of them standing in the cold, Five couldn’t remember the point of the training, it didn’t matter, but the old man had stared down at them, cold and calculating.

 

“You are equals,” He had said, “In strength, power!”

 

The old man had a thing for power, but also for control, Five had always known that their numbers signified how easily they could be manipulated, and he took pride in being so far down the list.

 

He tells Klaus about Delores, because for the moment he’s utterly down on his luck and the shadow of Death was just tolerable.

 

Klaus voices his awe and mentions something about being homeless and osso bucco, which Five will have to try sometime if he gets out of this fuckup alive.

 

He can’t take the shadows any longer, though, his stomach squeezing, there are invisible hands on his shoulders and he wonders if Klaus makes the barrier thin. Thin enough for the dead to just barely step through and wisp their cold breath through his hair.

 

He leaves his brother without the money, unable to stomach it, and startles the cab driver.

 

Finding Delores lifts a bit of weight from his chest, someone to talk to that wouldn’t distract him with strange habits and idiotic questions. She knew he didn’t have time to ask questions like what it felt like to be back here, among his family and his own original timeline. He hoped she hadn’t been spooked by the appearance of Hazel and Cha-Cha, she put up a strong front for him, but he knew she was nervous by nature. “I’ll find a Bordeaux in my old man’s cabinet later,” He kept his eyes on the Meritech doors, letting the silence press.

 

For only a moment, he was back there.

 

The ash fell, perpetual as the orange sky, the ground cracked and chipping gray. Fire dotted the horizon, dirt and oil scratched at him, under his clothes and sucking the air from his lungs. A heavy groan filled his ears, something falling and crumbling in the distance, the Meritech building  pile of rubble and the glass eye cracking in his clenched fist.

 

He screamed, his throat dry with dust, he felt himself crumbling, dusting away like the world around him. His back arched, muscles tightening as he fell to his knees. The hair on the back of his neck prickled, goosebumps racing up his arms and cold air bit at his cheeks. There was a yell:  _ “Five!” _

 

“No,” Five gasped, “No!”

 

The cold air prickled, needles on his skin. He almost meant to start digging, to bury himself deep underground and leave his body to rot-

 

“Five!”

 

The van shook, and he was sitting in the driver’s seat again.

 

Luther packed himself into the passenger's seat as tight as he could, all the while Five was shaking his head and rolling his eyes. He bit his tongue before he could say: “What the fuck do you want?”

 

He bit his tongue again before he could say: “I couldn’t care less about your idiotic meeting, dad’s  _ dead, _ you overgrown Capuchin-”

 

His hair stood on end and he flung himself around to see Klaus, his arms wrapped around Delores. “Get out! You can’t be here!” Five threw his empty coffee cup and Delores might have been laughing.

 

Spiders crawled under his skin when Klaus leaned in close and Five just wanted him  _ out _ -

 

He almost caught himself when Klaus’ expression changed to something sheepish, having tried to inquire about Five’s mission. He should have been more forthright with him, he had done more to help than his other siblings had in the last few days. Even if it had been done to get high.

 

But Luther was there, very much the same as he was when he was a kid, trying to be the leader without realizing father had never given him the chance to learn how to be one.

 

Klaus tapped him on the shoulder and they shared a look that Five couldn’t read.

 

“Have I ever told you about the time I tried to wax my ass with chocolate pudding?”

 

A smile tugged at Five’s mouth and he looked away, all his willpower shifting to resist the chill of death, the interjection reminded him vaguely of his Handler. The woman could talk about anything, unrestrained by social convention.

 

“It was so painful!” He laughed in Five’s ear, and Five realized too late that Klaus was only trying to distract him, having recognized the haunted look in his eyes.

 

Klaus had been the chill he had felt in his flashback, the cold contrast to the endless heat of the apocalypse. He suddenly clung to it, freezing over the dry warmth in his mind and grounding him to the true present inside the van.

 

Luther of course threw him out, the perceptions of his brother locked in as an addled junkie, his mind long gone after years of drug abuse. Moody and prone to wandering off, always having something to say about everything, talking to himself. Five picked uncomfortably at the dirt under his fingernails, aware of the similarities between the two of them.

 

Luther said something that scratched at Five’s brain: “You always thought you were better than us.”

 

Five couldn’t help but lean in and jab him right back, it was always the same with Luther, he was a bonehead that thought he could play at being witty. “I  _ know _ I’m better than you.” Five realizes he shouldn’t let resentments fester, and reminds himself that though Luther, the bonehead, was still an empathetic and sensitive person, Five had never been either of those things. 

 

“Hey bitches!”

 

Klaus whooped, running from a bodega and into the street, dodging pedestrians and cars as the bike cop sprinted after.

 

Five pressed his forehead into the steering wheel, going through several stages of grief as Luther rubbed at his face.

 

“A bit of a mistake on our part, maybe,” Luther shook the van as he clambered out, “He always acted out after getting scolded, even before all of the…” He waved his hand.

 

Five felt unwanted pity ebb at the edges of his mind, wishing he had more time to just fix his family before they had to face the upcoming end of days. More time to get over the feelings of decay in the presence of Klaus, maybe even find a way to ground him to examine the extent of his powers. More time to chip away at the claws in his brain that dug in every time Luther opened his mouth, just more time in general, more than just a measly six days to fix this.

 

Later, in the wake of the explosion of Meritech, standing at the base of the explosion and seeing the ash and the orange sky, he implemented his new method of bringing himself back.

 

He imagined the cold and aching bones, the cries of the dead at the back of his mind. Even with the heat of the flames, the sidewalk underneath was cold. 

 

He Blinked back to his van and gathered Delores.

 

Admittedly, he regretted getting drunk, he hated making any kind of scene that could draw Hazel and Cha-Cha ever closer. But taking a page from Klaus’ handbook, he’d borrowed some alcohol and went to the library.

 

“Yeah, borrowed, Del-” He swayed, his foot hitting the back of his other leg, leaving him to crash into the wall, “ _ Borrowed _ ...Borrowed, everything I’m doing is borrowed, borrowed  _ time _ , borrowed… liquor.” He giggled, traipsing clumsily up the stairs. He was practically holding her by her neck.

 

“Maybe, you know-oh shit- maybe… If dear old  _ Dad _ hadn’t bought me off my _ real _ mom and just left me in Italy this wouldn’t have happened.” He rammed his leg into a low table, spilling books onto the floor, “Fuck.”

 

“Maybe if we all just would have turned out normal,” He never really finished the thought, his math drifting off his stolen paper and onto the floor and onto the walls.

 

Diego and Luther had found him, carrying him to Diego’s little walk in closet of an apartment. He remembered spouting off nonsense about being the four horsemen of the apocalypse and barfing all over the back of Luther’s legs. “I am a gazelle,” He hissed, Diego had none of it, silencing him with a simple comeback:

 

“You’re something.”

 

That had been the one thing about his brother that had remained the same, Five was glad to see, his ability to respond to idiocy with a biting and honest truth. Five had once admired him for it, he admired anyone that could argue without actually arguing. For Five it had always been about facts and accountability, winning by knowing more, being better. Diego had been better at delivering the single fact, the defining truth of the fight, even if an opponent was committed to lies, Diego refused to let that bother him. 

 

If he wasn’t busy being hot headed and punching his way out, of course.

 

He was distracted by the time Five had woken up, his detective friend having given him a call and leaving Five with Luther.

 

He was still, frustratingly, an idealist. He was still young, still under their father’s false legacy of Doing What Was Good.

 

“There’s no good or bad, Luther,” Five stressed, “Just people.”

 

Five told himself that often, in the Commission.

 

The sharp squeak of a bus engine speared through his headache.

 

Another thing about Klaus that had remained the same: He took baths.

 

Almost too many, Five thought, remembering back to the time before his disappearance. Klaus would sometimes take three in one day, if he could sneak them in. Sitting in the tub, water up to his chin, bubbles overflowing to the floor. He had sometimes sunk under, his head submerged for a longer and longer time as he got better and better at holding his breath. He’d found it annoying as a child, but stopped caring when they’d turned nine, when Five needed a place to read his books away from his family and the bathroom was the one place they never disturbed him. Holing up with Klaus in the dim blue light of the bathroom had allowed them to get close without ever saying a word to each other, which had been why he allowed Klaus to lean on him to pose after a mission or occasionally drape clothes over his shoulders while deciding what to wear for an interview.

 

Five paused, following the red puddles from the bathroom to Klaus’ room. 

 

He had no time to build that bond again, not with the Commission on their heels and a fiery apocalyptic death to stop.

 

But the sight of bloody hand-prints on the side of the tub did steer him back down the hall.

 

Klaus was a sight.

 

He was thinner than the last time they had seen each other, more tan, his eyeliner gone and revealing the deep bags under his eyes. He moved like every bone ached, but had taken the time to change into his usual tight leather pants and Five could vaguely recall something he’d read about drug addicts a few days ago, just for some light reading, about how they often stuck to wearing the same clothes. He wondered if it applied to his brother.

 

The look Klaus gave him was filled with too many emotions for Five to understand, but it hurt to see. Along with Ben, Klaus had always been the most open book, in his own, emotionally stunted way.

 

“Are you okay?”   
  


Klaus twisted to put his shirt on, obviously not expecting the question.

 

“Long night,” He looked away.

 

It had all added up then and there, slapping Five in the face it was so  _ obvious. _

 

“More than one, it looks like.”

 

For once, his brother didn’t seem to carry his usual air of decay, instead, it was only a strange melancholy that dripped off his edges and the ends of his damp hair.

 

Five had to compartmentalize, no time to linger, if Klaus had the briefcase-

 

“You know they came looking for you?” Klaus asked, a short, meaningless anger that flared and was gone. Five felt his skin crawl and wondered how many of the dead were drifting through his body, riled by Klaus’ discomfort.

 

“I’m ten months older now,” Klaus laughed.

 

_ Try _ ten _ years, jackass _ , Five paced, _or twenty._  He knew if he gave into his anger Klaus would shut down, but after so many years of doing this alone he couldn’t help himself, fire flaring in his throat as Klaus yelled: “Why do you  _ care?” _

 

Five was so sick of screwing things up.

 

“I needed it you mo-To get back!”

 

The room went cold and the dead howled in his ears, or at least Five thought they were, he didn’t know what they sounded like.

 

Klaus was gone, and a new plan clawed at Five’s brain, a new path, another contingency.

 

He’d fix everything when this was done.

  
  
  



	2. Chapter 2

  
  
  


His car ride with Luther was left mostly to silence, a haughty distance still put between them at Five’s own behest. He wasn’t sure if Luther really noticed, the two of them being equally unskilled with people for wildly different reasons.

 

Anxiety ate at his skin, under his fingernails, and if he dug deep enough he could swear he felt the dust of the apocalypse. Still clinging on with ragged claws to his psyche. To distract himself he thought of the endless paradoxical outcomes of his mission, avoiding the ways Hazel and Cha-Cha would be able to smell their ruse from a mile away. 

 

One paradox: Could his stopping of the apocalypse lead his younger self to leap into a future untouched by by armageddon? If so, what would stir him into returning? Unless the timeline somehow branched and this would only be the end of ‘something’ as the Handler had said so long ago. Of course, if Five didn’t return because the future was left intact, who’s to say his lack of interference would lead to the apocalypse anyway? He feared the improbability of a time loop as a substitute for deeper emotional baggage, he was sure.

 

His head was starting to hurt.

 

Luther parked the car and offered to be his human shield.

 

Five was touched, a wistful feeling, he noted.

 

“You’re still a young man, Luther, with a whole life ahead of you,” Five almost patted him on the arm, “Well, presumably, if this goes well and the Earth isn’t razed and takes us all with it.”

 

Luther gave him a wide-eyed look, like he did when they were kids and Five was telling him something he wasn’t smart enough to understand. Except he understood this, and perhaps hearing a 13 year old telling him he was still young was a bit of a root shaker.

 

Five had never really referred to himself as an old man. 

 

50 was not old, or not as old as he thought it was when he was young. It was comfortably middle aged, and the added stress of the apocalypse had aged him clear past one hundred. He had been proud of it, every wrinkle and scar and crows foot. He’d survived the unsurvivable, and then it was all wiped away.

 

Perhaps he and Luther had something in common after all: Their bodies were no longer theirs.

 

He’d make it his again, Five would come to terms, it was still his own flesh and blood, but Luther…

 

There wasn’t much Five could say.

 

Hazel and Cha-Cha appeared looking slightly worse for wear, standard suits ripped, toy masks far more beat up than usual. Five had never understood their gimmick, though he supposed all of the Temporal Assassin’s had their thing. Theirs was playful masks and party favors, Sarah from Victorian Era Cleanup (VEC) did strangling with her own braids, Jacob from Wall Street Cleanup (WSC) had no eyelids, Five was from the apocalypse, it was a whole thing.

 

But he did feel a little ridiculous string at Cha-Cha when her face was some pink puppy-dog’s.

 

“Are those really necessary?”

 

Thankfully not.

 

Admittedly, he was a lot more nervous than he let on, even when coyly referring to Luther as: “Not your average giant.”

 

Hazel played his usual ‘Psycho with Sense’ routine, though he seemed more tired than usual. But Five’s conditions were met, Cha-Cha dialed the Handler and they settled in to wait.

 

His nerves shook his uneasy fingers, the gun tucked into the waistband of his shorts digging into his hip. He could the chiming of some instrument in the distance and chalked it up to his anxious mind.

 

Luther tilted his head, “Do you hear that?”

 

Five twitched, realizing a shared delusion would really-

 

Hazel and Cha-Cha shifted in his periphery, they had heard it too.

 

The chime grew louder, racing ever closer, bearing down on them from the other side of the hill. A familiar melody translated to xylophone, like the hoofbeats of a thousand horses, reaching its peak at the top of the hill. 

 

Flight of the Valkyries.

 

Signaling the arrival of, ridiculously, an ice cream truck, bouncing and swerving as if it’s driver had gone mad-

 

It passed them, and almost in slow motion, Five locked eyes with a deranged looking Klaus, waving manic with the palm: ‘HELLO’.

 

Five’s face twisted into disbelief, the very notion that Klaus had tracked them here, or had even found them by chance too strange to accept. Luther was just as incredulous, a wistful smile on his face as he returned the wave.

 

Cha-Cha screamed and Five swore, remembering the way Klaus had looked at him earlier in his room: “They took me instead.”

 

So a revenge plot, something Klaus might have been too gentle to enact on his own. Five tucked himself behind Luther, mind racing with possibilities. Klaus could have had a number of friends willing to scheme alongside him, but there was no personal stake, Five himself could have been in the passenger seat had Luther not been a willing participant, Allison would have had calmly provided a the Hermes car and had a sit down with them, but she hadn’t the pleasure of ever knowing the two temporal assassins… Ben had been a bit dastardly, back when he was alive, the brains behind Klaus’ pranks.

 

Of course, Diego!

 

Five shut his eyes, sighing, gunfire ringing in his ears.

 

It seemed these days Diego had put himself in charge of Klaus’ impulse control, softer with him than the rest of their family, though never as much as he was with Mom. Five had observed their symbiotic relationship in bits and pieces since his return: How Diego would loosen his jaw ever so slightly with Klaus, touching his arm to bring him around to the present. And how Klaus, seemingly beyond reasoning with, could turn off his attitude to offer Diego a conversation with something close to substance. Five felt the pinprick of jealousy at the base of his neck, the one relationship that had healed itself despite Father’s unhealthy games, unhindered by Diego’s standoffish and shark-like anger, and the cold fingers of death that Five couldn’t escape.

 

He shut the feeling away as the world turned sepia, the frozen world between seconds.

 

The Handler had asked him, begrudgingly: “All of them?”   
  


Five turned back to Luther, whose arms were spread wide, intending to shield him from harm, then to the ice cream truck, imagining Klaus and Diego locked in similar expressions of haste. His thoughts turned to Allison and Vanya, safe for now and away from harm.

 

Five realised that he couldn’t go on, not without them, for another second.

 

They’d been ripped apart by his own arrogance, by Ben’s death, and by Father’s hubris. But Five felt nothing but…

 

And he’d never say it out loud.

 

Five  _ loved  _ them. Every arrogant piece. No matter how they were splintered, it had been in the margins of his mission for 45 years: Keep his family alive. At all costs, because he couldn’t be alone anymore. He’d sit through Luther’s dimwitted arguments, pierce through Diego’s dickish exterior, muddle through Klaus’s three sided conversations with himself and grow used to his shadow. He’d go to every one of Vanya’s concerts and see every single one Allison’s romantic comedies straight through to the credits if it meant having them back. Five felt it like his own heartbeat, a raging bonfire at the pit of his stomach, it put his skin on fire and curled his fists. 

 

They’d been ripped apart and grown indifferent but they were still a family, Klaus and Diego had done it all by themselves. 

 

Five put all of his venom behind his next words:  _ “All of them.” _

 

The Handler knew there would be no arguments, no bargaining, there was nothing she could ever say to negotiate.

 

She agreed to his terms.

 

The base in 1950s Pennsylvania was classy, conservative, and easy to navigate. He inquired about his own Handler, the one who assigned his marks while serving as an assassin. She was a perky, spritely woman, in charge of all apocalypse matters.

 

That meant if someone did something, big or small, to prevent the apocalypse, she would be in charge of its correction. “So say, and just as an example,” She smiled, he did not, “Some man named Patrick forgot to tip a waitress in 1996, and then she didn’t have the money to buy ice cream, so she couldn’t smile at the man that serves her her soft scoop and then…” She waved her hand in the air, “Well, you get it, that tip means dozens and then hundreds of actions aren’t to schedule and the apocalypse doesn’t get set, so  _ I,”  _ She shimmied happily, “Get to send someone down and make sure Patrick remembers to tip! Don’t you just love the butterfly effect?” 

 

Five blinked, “It’s certainly tedious,” She nods.

 

“I wouldn’t have any other way,” She tilts her head, “Though I have had a few slips, did you know the apocalypse has been delayed up to five hours before? I managed to get it back down to a healthy one and a half.” Her smile was too bright, it itched at Five’s eyes just to look at, even as she kept talking: “Your arrival was completely unexpected as well, your family keeps strange records, you know! I mean your file in the Office of Possibilities alone-”

 

“I’d love to hear about it,” Five tutted, “I do have a task I need to finish here.”

 

“Oh, oh, sure-”

 

He turned away before she could continue.

 

The task is juvenile, the Hindenburg Disaster, have human innovation turn instead to metal tubes and uncomfortable seats rather than the completely safe Zeppelin. Whatever.

 

He takes his sweet time, and, completely without meaning to, ends up at the Office of Possibilities.

 

Unlike all the other strange improbabilities of the Temps Commission, it looks rather plain. Filing cabinets upon filing cabinets, he wondered if the Commission would ever think of going digital, or maybe there simply wasn’t enough processing power for all of time and space.

 

Their filing system was complicated, but not enough for Five. His own file was buried under the inventor of pancakes and Bitcoin, simple enough.

 

It’s heavy and not really worth the read, though it did get a lot more detailed once his path had been shifted into the apocalypse, all things he could or might do, but none of the educated guesses ever got close to what he had planned. He smiled, sly, secure in the fact that the timeline was just as messy and unpredictable as the Commission said it wasn’t. They had only wrangled a small bit of it. But the file did have the appearance of being incomplete, like there was more hidden away somewhere. He closed it with a snap.

 

He’d found a few other files, mostly just Morning News anchors, influencing viewers lives every other day.

 

He’d only stumbled on Klaus’ file as he was trying to leave.

 

It was less of a file, though, and more of a disorganized pile of multicolored paper by the door.

 

Five had tripped over it, rather ungracefully.

 

Someone had been in the middle of organizing it, though it was so completely out of sorts that Five even felt the challenge it presented. Just like the man himself, Five thought, aching to return to 2019.

 

He read a page or two, out of curiosity.

 

One page detailed the possibilities of his accidental trip through time, all the different places he could go from Paris in the 1700s to Barbados in the 80s. Five already knew when, he’d seen the insignia for the 173rd Airborne Brigade tattooed on his arm, old news. He dropped the paper.

 

The other was labeled: Deaths by Overdose.

 

It wasn’t many, and most of their dates had passed, though technically not, by time travel standards. But most of them were labeled: ‘Preventable’ near the end of their descriptions.

 

One possible overdose had yet to pass.

 

Five blinked back to his desk, leaving the paper behind.

 

He needed to stay his course, not get hung up on the possibilities.

 

He knew he had made it when the world went from fast to slow. It was yesterday again, or, his yesterday, it didn’t matter. But his family looked a little worse for wear.

 

They were confused, as he suspected they would be, resistant, as he knew they would be, but Harold Jenkins took top priority.

 

He rested for a moment, his side aching, wet with meaningless blood. Coffee wasn’t the relief he was hoping for, and he threw it behind him, desperate to release his adrenaline.

 

“Get over yourselves, or we’re screwed,” He made eye contact with each of them, “Dad messed us up, are we gonna let that define us?”

 

For a moment we worried Luther would interject, but Five only found readiness in his eyes.

 

Diego grunted, and Allison had known the answer to that question for a while.

 

It was in Klaus that Five found the assurance he really desired: the strong shake of his head, the ordeal he’d gone through in the Vietnam war had strengthened his brother, as all ordeals were wont to do to a person. Five could understand that better than most.

 

What did not assure him was the fact that Klaus looked sicker than a dog, sweat shining on his brow and his eyeliner smudged and streaking down his cheeks. The cold had given way to a wet sort of heat, the kind that clung to bodies rotting in the sun, or in the jungles of Vietnam. It was sick, they way he was, and it was noticeable. Even when they were used to it, numbers 1 through 3 kept their distance from him.

 

“We didn’t choose this life, we’re just living it.” Five spoke softly, admitting to them, and then to Allison that he knew Claire, and he told the firm and honest truth that he wanted to meet her someday.

 

His sister took real charge then, as it seemed the real love a parent could have for their child was a real and tangible thing, and not the coldness that Reginald had had.

 

She made a call to Vanya outside the police station, her posture low with worry. It was another comfort to Five, another relationship that was willing to repair itself, much like Klaus and Diego.

 

He felt warm, though he didn’t mean to, leaning up against the wall as his side ached. He felt warmth for his sister, both of them. Even when they were younger, they had looked out for Allison, perhaps some sort of brotherly instinct that none of them could get rid of. It went for Vanya too, though to a lesser extent, since she never found herself in much danger. But for Allison, she never had to rumor them into doing anything nice for her, until they were being obnoxious, she was simultaneously their baby sister and their oldest sibling, above even Number One.

 

And now she was at the forefront of an impossible task: making things right between every one.

 

“I admire your persistence.”  He told her.

 

She tilted her head, smiling at his unexpected compliment. “I guess I just… I feel guilty, about everything, lately, especially about what we did to her.”

 

“When this is over,” Five nodded, grimacing at the ache in his side, “We’ll have all the time in the world to make it up.”

 

She nodded, and then, unfortunately, things to a turn towards the complicated.

 

Harold Jenkins, Leonard Peabody, what a joke.

 

Five couldn’t wait to shove his head through a wall.

 

His attic was full of their memorabilia, including most of his own limited run of action figures, discontinued out of respect, he ventured.

 

Allison had always had the most PR, even more than Luther, she was never camera shy, and took to makeup and bright lights better than the rest of them. Even more than Klaus, who might have been too… Five would say flamboyant-for the magazines that had wanted to portray them as a tough crime-fighting unit. Klaus often posed with Allison, standing with his back arched and shoulder bent like a Hollywood starlet. Or he was with Ben and draped across his brother’s shoulders, he was too ‘girly’, too effeminate for the press.

 

The posters that had ‘The Seance’  featured as how they wanted him were robotic, positioned just right, and even with his eyes gouged out. Five thought he looked tired. It was the same for Diego, and even Ben. Behind the Domino masks, the sheer weight of what their father was doing to them was already seeping into their bones.

 

Five could relate, collapsing to the floor in a heap.

 

When he woke, Allison had gone, his side was patched, and Luther looked rough.

 

Hungover rough, which might explain the terrible coffee, a simple hangover cure instead of clear, perfect black coffee.

 

Klaus had set out one cup extra, Five noted, perhaps for Diego. Until Diego was a no show, but the cup stayed.

 

Klaus banged on the table, as loud as possible for Luther, clearly getting a laugh out of his predicament. The appearance of ‘perfect brother’ having been finally tossed out the window. Klaus might have been angry too, under all the jokes, angry about something Luther might have done.

 

For once, Klaus didn’t voice these feelings, as Five might have expected him to. In fact, Klaus appeared more present and awake than he had in days. Still neurotic and addled, as exemplified by the strange pauses he left, listening to someone else speak, but he was there.

 

Five almost forgot to notice the shadow, now distant, healed from yesterday’s rotting flesh.

 

There was no cold, no claws, just simply there. “I’m sober! I got clean-yesterday, to talk to someone special.”

 

“Alright, I’ll play,” Five took it at face value, the differences he felt proving real and maybe even a response to something, it was only scientific to take note of the changes, “What did the old man have to say?”   
  


Klaus was confident, prepared, and happy to answer, until he wasn’t.

 

“He-” Klaus folded like a deck of cards, “-Killed… himself.”

 

Five wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before, but really the only person that could connect such types of dots was Klaus. Luther had no intention of believing it, until Pogo only confirmed it all as fact. Five wanted to ask Klaus more questions, more detailed research had to be conducted, but the lack of scientific and mathematical means in a power like Klaus’s was a road far less traveled by, and it intimidated Five. More than he would have liked to admit.

 

“I need to think.” He said, blinking back to his room.

 

In truth, he didn’t do much of that. Only getting dressed and pacing, ignoring Delores’ attempts at calming him down. He rationed that Luther knew dad best, seeing as Five needed answers, he could provide. 

 

Luther was nowhere to found.

 

There was no more time to ask questions, then, Luther rendered useless by his own insecurities and Five felt bad for him really, it just wasn’t the best time for him to finally face facts.

 

Klaus was here, though, Five paced back down the hall, hands behind his back. Klaus had helped him succeed once, and Five needed to work his options. A newly sober Klaus, while a liability in recovery, was all he had.

 

Five told him so as he gathered his things.

 

“Well thank you,” Klaus patted him on the head, “I guess my whole Outlander bit helped a little, at least _ I think  _ that show is about time travel.”

 

Thankfully Diego returned, meaning their defense was up by one to confront Harold.

 

Klaus knew every bar in town, and Luther could be stopped before he could begin his bender, that didn’t halt Five’s indifference toward them as the mission began anew. There was a lead, a way to stop what was coming.

 

Though he couldn’t help threatening Luther just a little, bringing a small smile to Klaus’ face before pressing his foot to the gas.

 

He was deflated again, finding Allison like she was. They had all jumped to help her, remembering from childhood that they were all the same blood type, O, universal donor, ironic, considering the reputation of superheroes and the whole ‘saving lives’ thing.

 

Diego fainted, Klaus giggled at the absurdity of it all.

 

Five needed to lie down.

 

Finding Harold Jenkins they way they did had been oddly… unsatisfying.

 

“But who killed her?”

 

In the presence of Death, Klaus’ voice was strong, his shadow a stronger presence, enveloping them and the body in some sort of strange act of finality. “Why don’t we find Vanya, and _ ask  _ her?”

 

Klaus had the most common sense in this family, especially when sober.

 

Vanya was nowhere to be found, or maybe they just weren’t trying hard enough.

 

Five felt jittery, unable to relax. Diego was still obsessed with finding Hazel and Cha-Cha, some plan for vengeance to enact. Five found himself being short with Klaus, incapable of having a conversation, even when that conversation was focused on Five, no amount of narcissism could pull him out of his mood,

 

Then Klaus said: “I guess we’re both fighting our addictions then.”

 

It was a shallow dig, in retaliation for Five being unable to believe his commitment, but it struck him at the bone, boiling over in Five’s mind. Klaus had always known just what to say to push his siblings over the deep end. Even Five, who was a closed book even at nine years old.

 

“I’m not an addict,” He spat, squeezing the eye in his fist.

 

“Yeah ya’ are,” Klaus taunted, “To a drug called:  _ The apocalypse. _ ”

 

Against his will, Five twitched, turning the prosthetic over and over in between his fingers, “You’re wrong.”

 

Klaus smiled, “First sign: Denial.”

 

Five’s breath hitched, a manic energy pushing him to Blink back in front of Klaus, taking over his whole view. He shoved a finger at his brother’s chest, desperate to win this little spat, “You and I-” Klaus laughed, a sound that grated on Five’s very being, vibrating his atoms, “W-We are _ not  _ the same-”

 

Klaus seemed to leer down at him, it wasn’t the shadow that bothered Five now, it was Klaus’ own security in his observation, “I’ve seen that look before, in the eyes of someone who doesn’t know who they are without their high.” Klaus gestured at his own person and Five blinked hard, his mind moving an inch at a time, too slow to rationalize a comeback even though there had to be one, somewhere, something to prove it wasn’t anything like that-

 

“Trust me, just let it go-”

 

The eye ended up smashing against the wall, glass embedding in the polished oak paneling.

 

Klaus still laughed.

 

Maybe it was the margarita.

 

Delores said: “He’s right, dear.”

 

And Five looked up at her: “It’s over between us, isn’t it?”

 

“I think it has to be, hon.”

 

She was wonderfully blunt at the best of times.

 

When he came home to a house destroyed, he didn’t feel vindicated.

 

He felt shame.

 

At the bowling alley, as Klaus tried to prove his own worth, creating a sudden flash of cold that flickered dim at the edge of Five’s periphery, he felt fear.

 

Maybe it let up as Diego and Klaus were mistaken for a couple.

 

But he was afraid, as the Handler gloated and the lady from the donuts shop (what was she doing here?) whined from under duct tape gag.

 

“You could die with your family-”

 

An excellent suggestion.

 

Five would take it.

 

And Vanya-

 

Vanya looked beautiful, even as she threatened all life on Earth. She really deserved it, for all that Five had failed to do, she really deserved to take this one.

 

Luther gave the plan to rush her, terrible really, she was more powerful than all of them combined.

 

But the Commission SWAT would kill them first. Five was resigned, but he was here to die with his family.

 

Klaus ran in, yelling, no doubt having been placed in the position of lookout, fat lot of good that did-

 

They shot at him, and he took a dive. Anger flared in Five’s gut, blinking himself onto their back and turning the shooter around at his squad. “ _ That’s my _ brother,  _ fuckface! _ ”

 

Snapping his neck was his last good act before dying.

 

Until-

 

The shadow returned, giving Five the guilt of having not gotten used to it one last time, it knew death was imminent and it enveloped them all.

 

Klaus yelled, grunting with effort, and the shadow shifted.

 

When Five turned, seeing Ben, the Horror, glowing blue and Klaus behind him, his fists clenched like Five’s, their equalizer-

 

The shadow went from darkness to light, death to life, and Ben was there. Five couldn’t help his elation, the fear gone and replaced, by what he didn’t know.

 

Death’s cold shadow was gone.

 

And it almost sounded like Ben: “How’s that for a lookout?”

 

And he was gone.

 

Klaus was smiling.

 

Five admired him, more than anything, and he told him so once they had all joined hands as a family and were whisked away to the past.

 

For a moment they were children again, united as family, no longer strangers.

 

The dust had settled and they were still themselves, still in grown bodies.

 

“Me?” Klaus had smiled in disbelief. “Moi? Are you sure you’re not high?”

 

“I’m telling you the truth Klaus,” Five said, sure, “You’re an incredibly strong person, I was ready to die with my family at Icarus…” He took a long sip of his coffee, “But you were willing to live for us.”

 

Klaus took his hand from across the table, two men out of time, “You’re my brother Five, my little brother even,” he didn’t mean it as the joke it was, “It’s my job to look out for you.”

 

“As it is mine,” Five nodded, “We’re still strangers, but-”

 

“But we’re family,” Klaus shrugged, sitting back, “I get it, I love you too.”

 

Five took a sip of his coffee to hide a smile.

 

Death’s shadow was Life’s call to push him forward.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lol who else out there thinks them looking like kids at the end was a metaphor? raise your hand.  
> Thank you all so much for reading!! :'') Find me on tumblr @sangrientojoe !! Talk to me about TUA!

**Author's Note:**

> Hey you can find me on tumblr: @sangrientojoe.tumblr.com ! come and talk to me lol


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